Unless you’ve lived in a cave these past few years, you know exactly what happened to Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011. But unless you’ve staked out international CIA operation bases these past 10 years, you really have no idea how it happened.
Audiences for “Zero Dark Thirty” only care about the second part, and that’s all they get — no more, no less. This is why the controversial project is more than just a movie.
It’s staged journalism at its very best, driven by intense urgency to pose questions about the smaller details — not the larger story — of the greatest manhunt in American history. If only for the stellar performances and stylistic nuances that bring these questions front and center, this film needs to be seen.
Director-screenwriter duo Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal recount the decade-long search for Bin Laden through a young CIA officer named Maya (Jessica Chastain). A “killer” officer by reputation, Maya receives an assignment in Pakistan helping fellow officer Dan (Jason Clarke) extract information from a detainee. Given nothing but a single name, Maya spends her next eight years turning the lead into accurate intel on Bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Condensing 10 years of intelligence projects into a lean 157 minutes, the script never stops to breathe. At least not until the very last shot, which is more than worth the time it takes to get there. Up until that moment, however, you’ll find purpose to every scene and fierce propulsion from one sequence to the next.
The graphic torture scenes get tucked into this rhythm, each treated as a means to the greater end awaiting on May 1. Combined with the documentary feel of their handheld aesthetic, their pace lends — to torture, of all things — a remarkable even-handedness.
The same goes for the penultimate sequence depicting the Team Six raid on Bin Laden’s compound. Instantaneous shootings of human impediments to Bin Laden quickly turn one of America’s greatest moments into one of its morally grayest.
Even still, those glorious 30 minutes burst with so much kinetic energy and real-time tension that you just might not give a crap about how responsible the film is.
Chastain and Clarke bring a similar sense of sheer excitement to their roles. Though their characters spend most of their screen time spitting out facts, they make those facts entertaining.
As Maya, Chastain does so through her simultaneous concealment and outpouring of an outrage felt nationwide. She knows that there’s a time to weep over al-Qaeda’s evildoings, but not until she’s done all she can to decapitate the terrorist group. Like Clarke, Chastain glows on screen.
This is all just to say, paradoxically, that this is more than just a movie; but it is indeed a movie.
It romps, stomps and enthralls like nothing you’ve ever seen before — maintaining journalistic integrity all the while. Self-proclaimed goers of films, of movies, of journalistic cinema … Go, go, go.
Dive verdict: ?????
Contact the desk editor at diversions@dailytarheel.com.
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